owson could hardly go on, so keenly did he realise the presence of the
woman beside him. The soft fluttering breath unmanned him. But by
degrees Nelly heard all there was to know; especially the details of
the rapid revival of hearing, speech, and memory, which had gone on
through the preceding three days.

'And what is such a blessing,' said Howson, with the cheerfulness of the
good doctor--'is that he seems to be quite peaceful--quite at rest. He's
not unhappy. He's just waiting for you. They'll have given him an
injection of strychnine this evening to help him through.'

'How long?' The words were just breathed into the darkness.

'A day or two certainly--perhaps a week,' he said reluctantly. 'It's a
question of strength. Sometimes it lasts much longer than we expect.'

He said nothing to her of her sister's visit. Instinctively he suspected
some ugly meaning in that story. And Nelly asked no questions.

Suddenly, she was aware of lights in the darkness, and then of a great
camp marked out in a pattern of electric lamps, stretching up and away
over what seemed a wide and sloping hillside. Nelly put down the window
to see.

'Is it here?' 'No. A little further on.'

It seemed to her interminably further. The car rattled over the rough
pavement of a town, then through the darkness of woods--threading its
way through a confusion of pale roads--until, with a violent bump, it
came to a stop.

In the blackness of the November night, the chauffeur, mistaking the
entrance to a house, had run up a back lane and into a sand-bank.

'Do you hear the sea?' said Howson, as he helped Nelly to alight.
'There'll be wind to-night. But here we are.'

She looked round her as they walked through a thin wood. To her right
beyond the bare trees was a great building with a glass front. She could
see lights within--the passing figures of nurses--rows of beds--and men
in bed jackets--high rooms frescoed in bright colours.

'That used to be the Casino. Now it's a Red Cross Hospital. There are
always doctors there. So when we moved him away from the camp, we took
this little house close to the Hospital. The senior surgeon there can be
often in and out. He's looking after him splendidly.'

A small room in a small house, built for summer lodgings by the sea;
bare wooden walls and floor; a stove; open windows through which came
the slow boom of waves breaking on a sandy shore; a bed, and in it an
emaciated figure, propped up.

Nelly,